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If there was a tendency to play sports psychologist during the Maple Leafs season-ending exit meetings on Wednesday, the team’s management and coaching staff avoided it.

The wounds will heal eventually, was the apparent strategy, along with the belief that the mental strength that helped them to succeed as professional athletes will serve as therapy on its own.

“Some will be more affected by this than others, that will always be the case,” Leafs vice-president of hockey operations, Dave Poulin, said Wednesday in an interview. “Everybody digests a situation like this in their own matter. For some it will be reflected by their own experience, by their own role in what happened. They will continue to digest it.

“There’s a support group in that locker room that the guys in there generally like each other and work hard for each other. This is where you would like to keep the team together for a few more days instead of scattering and returning home.”

For most, that will happen some time on Thursday after one final media obligation, a chance to attempt to put in their own words what happened in Monday’s 5-4 overtime loss to the Boston Bruins, the Game 7 gut wrencher that will remain with them the rest of their lives.

On Wednesday, each player went through their formal debrief, individual meetings both with the coaching staff and with the management group. The details of what happened on Monday weren’t necessarily a significant part of the agenda, either. More likely, players were told where they stood with the team and what was good and not so good about the big picture of the season.

Typically in these affairs, the player is also told what is expected of him in the off-season in order to be more efficient when training camp convenes in October.

“It’s a combination of emotion,” Poulin said when asked about the tone of his own sessions with Leafs players. “There is anger. There is disappointment. There’s the sense of the challenge that awaits. There is all of the above. And there’s certainly a factor that we have to keep getting better, which is something that we would have stressed even if we would have won the series.”

Lessening the blow of the disappointment, in Poulin’s view, is the considerable upside with the franchise.

“Youth is definitely in our favour,” Poulin said. “We are the youngest team in the NHL. If the team was built specifically to win this year and we had traded a lot away at the deadline or given up on the future — in other words, if we had sold out — we may feel differently.

“This is a young group with a young core and with a young group coming up to push this group. (General manager) Dave Nonis has maintained that this is a work in progress. There’s lots of work to do. Management has a lot of work to do over the summer and the players have a lot of work to do over the summer.

“If we weren’t going in the direction we are, it might feel different. But that is not the case.”

Interestingly, the more Poulin watches the horror film, the more he maintains that the Bruins comeback was not a collapse by the Leafs. That too may be part psychology, but his point was that all the Leafs needed was one bounce or one properly cleared loose puck.

“It wasn’t a collapse,” Poulin said. “It was two goals on two minutes in the last minute and 20. In Game 5, we were on our heels and they were coming at us. That was not the feeling in Game 7.”

As for soothing the wounds of the heart and the head of the players involved, Poulin said it was largely left alone at the post-season meetings.

“There are enough people around the team and the guys will talk about themselves,” Poulin said. “As professional athletes, they will turn this into a positive.

“It won’t happen today, but over the course of time. Whether it’s bumping into the players over the summer or just finding a way to put it in the past. The best answer to all these questions is how will the team respond next season. We won’t know until they start playing again.”

Win or lose, improve or regress in the future, it can’t erase the Monday meltdown.

Maple Leafs: Tough getting over epic collapse

If there was a tendency to play sports psychologist during the Maple Leafs season-ending exit meetings on Wednesday, the team’s management and coaching staff avoided it.

The wounds will heal eventually, was the apparent strategy, along with the belief that the mental strength that helped them to succeed as professional athletes will serve as therapy on its own.

“Some will be more affected by this than others, that will always be the case,” Leafs vice-president of hockey operations, Dave Poulin, said Wednesday in an interview. “Everybody digests a situation like this in their own matter. For some it will be reflected by their own experience, by their own role in what happened. They will continue to digest it.

“There’s a support group in that locker room that the guys in there generally like each other and work hard for each other. This is where you would like to keep the team together for a few more days instead of scattering and returning home.”